Ennis flies high for BA in Olympics stunt with an idea that’s as old as the hills (but still works)

From the Jubilee to the Olympics, the Great British summer of PR stuntery continues.

It did of course pause for a brief spell at the Euros, but Taylor Herring team have had enough smoke blown up their collective arses for the unmitigated success with a reimagining of Hodgson as a latter-day-Christ-the-Redeemer, so I thought that I’d leave that one for this week.

So it is that we find ourselves with another BA stunt. And another moment in the sun for the boys and girls at Cake Group, who can take enormous credit for the sheer simplicity of their “Welcome to Our Turf” stunt for the national carrier, which is mounting an erstwhile and largely rewarded campaign to regain its position as “the media’s favourite airline”.

For those who didn’t see it, the stunt was a textbook lesson in the idea that sometimes, just sometimes, the obvious idea is the best.

The story made all over the place with the pictures making good across the web.

Why did it work?

Because, on so many levels, it is so obvious.

Not infrequently (and this may of course be a personal thing rather than a universal), we come up with the client’s riff on the tried-and-tested tactic.

In this case, paint a bloody great message in a field on a flight path. It’s route A stuff, let’s be honest.

Then of course, a whole team (or agency for that matter) engages in a week’s worth of soul-searching, creative brainstorming and tubes-home pondering trying to come up with something better.

The truth in this case was that the obvious answer was the best. It may have been done before as a tactic. It may seem like the straightforward and, somehow, less creative, route.

But creativity is not about complexity for the sake of it. It isn’t about torturing a client’s message into an idea into which it will simply not fit. It’s about conveying those messages as clearly as possible to as many people as possible.

This idea is a reminder that where the obvious answer presents itself, try as we might, there are sometimes reason to embrace it rather than out-think ourselves or think around it.

In other words, the adage that the “old ones are the best” is sometimes as aptly applied to a stunt as it is to the gags of by-gone eras.